tags 435648 fixed-upstream
thanks
fixed in upstream 3.04.
Hello Vincent,
Vincent Lefevre wrote:
Package: manpages-dev
Version: 2.62-1
Severity: normal
The scanf man page says:
ยท An optional decimal integer which specifies the maximum field
width. Reading of characters stops either when this maximum is
reached or when a non-matching character is found, whichever
happens first. Most conversions discard initial whitespace
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
characters (the exceptions are noted below), and these discarded
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
characters don't count towards the maximum field width. String
input conversions store a null terminator ('\0') to mark the end
of the input; the maximum field width does not include this ter-
minator.
and
The following conversion specifiers are available:
% Matches a literal '%'. That is, %% in the format string matches
a single input '%' character. No conversion is done, and
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
assignment does not occur.
So, one may think that since %% doesn't do a conversion, initial
whitespace is not discarded. But this is incorrect: initial whitespace
is discarded (as required by the ISO C standard). The C standard has
better wording ("conversion specification" instead of "conversion"):
Interestingly, the wording of the man page is quite close to the
POSIX.1 spec:
% Matches a single '%' character; no conversion or assignment
occurs. The complete conversion specification shall be %% .
[...] A conversion specification is executed in the following steps:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Input white-space characters (as specified by the isspace function)
are skipped, unless the specification includes a [, c, or n specifier.
The scanf man page should probably say: "... Most conversion
specifications discard initial whitespace characters ..."
I prefer to be more explicit. For the description of %% I changed
the text to:
No conversion is done (but initial white space characters are
discarded), and assignment does not occur.
okay?
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
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